Considering the number of posts I’ve written about Fallout 3 already, an official “review” of it wouldn’t be appropriate, so I thought I write a summation of my final thoughts about this game. First up, this is easily the most controversial game of 2008, at least within the gaming community itself. On the one hand, the game has been an undeniable success, selling faster than Bethesda’s previous hit Oblivion and selling more than all of the previous Fallout titles combined. Its review scores are uniformly high across the board, with the PC version in particular being widely recognized as the best across all platforms. This last part is especially impressive given how badly the PC ports of games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Saint’s Row 2 have since turned out.

On the other hand, ever since it was first announced, this game has spawned a small but extremely vocal gang of detractors. Explaining the full history behind all this animosity would take far too long, but the short version is that they call themselves diehard fans of the original Fallout games and are disgusted that Bethesda bought the rights to make this game when, according to their sense of justice, it should have been made by the group behind the original titles. It’s not like there’s no substance to their arguments, but the sheer spittle-spewing vitriol of their attacks makes them look bad, and not unlike what you may find posted on sites like Free Republic and Hillary is 44 on Barack Obama’s inauguration day.

Continue reading Fallout 3 Final Thoughts →

I’ve been wandering around the Capital Wasteland for what feels like ages now, but when I look at the map, it’s obvious that there’s still a lot of unexplored territory left. I’m kind of beginning to feel burnt out on the game though and I think I know why: I feel too powerful. There’s literally nothing that I fear out there anymore. A Vertibird dropping an Enclave patrol? A pack of deathclaws? Sentry robots? Bring them on. Between my pack full of explosives, thousands of rounds of ammunition for my unique plasma rifle, an endless supply of stimpacks to keep me healed up and my companion helping out, it’s only a matter of seconds before all my enemies bite the dust.

It’s not just a question of turning the combat difficulty up a notch either. All that does is increase the health and the damage of your enemies. That kills immersiveness because it’s just silly to see an unprotected human head take so many direct hits without turning into a bloody pulp. No, the real problem is that I’m too rich and have too much stuff now, so the Wasteland no longer feels like a forbidding, fearsome place to me. Where once simply stepping out beyond the relative safety of the walls of Megaton felt like an adventure and spotting the bald green head of a Super Mutant was enough to give me pause and think about my approach, I no longer take any care at all travelling. I’m perfectly happy to barrel straight towards my destination knowing that whatever is in my path can’t possibly be any significant threat to me.

Continue reading Surviving the Wasteland →

After playing through a good bit more of Fallout 3, I thought I’d make a series of posts to note some of my observations about the different aspects of the game. This one will focus on the combat. As expected, this works very differently depending on how much you choose to rely on the VATS system. VATS is really a variation of the bullet-time ability introduced in Max Payne except that it pauses everything while you decide what to do and allows you to target specific body parts. While paused, you decide what actions you’re going to perform using your allotment of Action Points, with different weapons costing a different amount of APs to fire. Once you’ve made your decisions, your actions are played out in a slow-motion cinematic which can be cool to watch the first several times.

Continue reading Fighting in the Wasteland →

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for about a week now, and I can happily say that it’s probably one of the best games I’ve ever played. When people talk about open-world games, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the Grand Theft Auto series and its legion of imitators, but Bethesda Softworks have been making three-dimensional open worlds since Arena was released in 1994. It was at that time insanely ambitious but successfully set the stage for a series that would become known for its huge, open worlds rendered in lush, beautiful graphics and a completely open and free-form design that could leave some players paralyzed by the bewildering array of possible places to go and things to do in the game.

Fallout 3 is in some ways the logical conclusion of one end of that evolution: the video game as immersive virtual world. Reading the comments by detractors in this thread on LYN for example (most of whom it seems were complaining about a game that they’d pirated since they started playing it before it was actually released), it’s obvious that many of them didn’t get what this game is about. Take for example the complaints about how short the game is. It’s still early days yet in my journey through the wastes, so I can’t fully tell whether this is true or not, but I suspect that if you make a beeline for the main quest and barrel through it to the exclusion of everything else, you’d end up finishing the game in fairly short order.

Continue reading Wandering the wasteland →